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TRIGGER WARNING for character suicide

Mano had found her lying on her back in a perfect corpse asana, perfect right down to every last detail.

Her own body's reaction had been in stark contrast with that kind of stillness until she'd worn herself out, and at the funeral, she hadn't only worn black clothing, she'd made her entire body itself black.

'Elizabeth was the kind of person who this world needs more of, not less off, who cared about others more than about herself, who gave so much and got so little in return. She's been through worse and she's accomplished more than anyone I've ever known. She was a force of nature, and nature will miss her. I wish I could have made her as happy as she made me. I'm sorry, everyone... I tried.'

Mano had walked away from her short eulogy and out of the mourners' lives under the heart-wrenching violin and drizzling city sky.

"There are just too many of you and there's only one of me."

Mano had been given a choice by Elizabeth's publishing house: either she'd have collected a certain percentage of royalties and some decision-making power regarding everything they'd sell, or they'd have given her a certain moderately large amount right then and there and they'd have made every other decision regarding her work and kept everything else it would have made from then on. While she'd known that, in terms of strict profitability, the former would have been a much better deal for her to have agreed to, she'd been becoming incredibly strapped for cash since she'd become too emotionally scarred by loss, by negative mental associations, by how meaningless any work without her had seemed, and by the fear of asking the questions which would have done more harm than good to do her job, so she'd reluctantly selected the latter option as desperate measures for which the desperate times had called.

Mano had developed a weird love-hate relationship with the cult following which had gathered around Elizabeth's posthumously published work. For one thing, she'd wished it hadn't taken the suicide of a poet to lend her work notoriety, and had wondered where this fan base had been when she'd still been alive and would have needed them the most, rather than when they'd needed a martyr. For another, she'd drawn many idealists and they, true to themselves, had idealized her, never really taking into account that she'd only been a mortal with normal failings which hadn't always made her easy to get along with on a daily basis, that sometimes she'd just needed to vent and that no conventional outlet had seemed like it could accurately express what she'd needed to let out, and that as much as she'd enjoyed using symbols to get her point across, sometimes a cigar had just been a cigar. Her fans had seemed to think that they'd gotten to know her better from having read and analyzed her work than Mano had from having lived with her for years, and she'd found the very idea contemptible. Then again, Elizabeth had complained to Mano before about the origins of the word hysteria and its implications more than once, and Mano had thought that her criticism had made enough sense that she hadn't been able to bring herself to make her look like a monster by pointing out even only that her anger had sometimes been misdirected, just like anybody else's could be. Besides, Elizabeth had said that once the art was out there, it'd no longer belonged to her and she'd had to accept that.

There'd been nothing Mano could have done to get any closure, no one to get revenge on because the murderer had also been the victim and guilt, resentment, loneliness and regret had combined to stew together in her chest day in, day out. She'd ended up uncharacteristically deciding that she'd force herself to do something completely irrational, impetuous and spur of the moment no matter how impractical and unwise it had seemed to her just for once in her life and would spend all of the money she'd gotten from Elizabeth's publishing house as fast as possible on whatever she could think of. She'd answered the first question she'd asked herself regarding how much of it she should spend on others and how much of it she should spend on herself as fast as she'd been able to also, and although if she'd thought about it a while longer she might have settled on 2/3 or even ¾ of it for others, right then and there the first answer which had come to her mind had been fifty-fifty, no more, no less.

"You've got your space and I've got my space, see? Everyone's happy."

Elizabeth had implied that she'd wanted Mano to learn from her experience, and one thing Mano had learned from it was that if she'd treated herself less well than she'd thought that other people had deserved to be treated, she'd become miserable, and that would only end up punishing the people who'd have cared about her the most. Since she wouldn't have come down on anyone else for spending half on themselves, she didn't think she deserved to be come down on for it either. After all, some people would have just spent everything on themselves without even thinking about giving any of it away. She'd receive without owing and give without feeling owed. She'd given a quarter of the total to well-researched charity organizations all over the world and had run stealthily through the streets distributing the second quarter to beggars and homeless people all over town, the latter of which having been a crazy idea she'd gotten from Moon Palace.

The third quarter she'd spent on something which would not only let her get away from the painful memories drifting like phantasms through the Brazilian streets, but would ensure that she'd never have to go through another big move again. Like Hephaestus laboring over his forge, with an iron mask, a welding torch, a wrench, a saw, a drill, clamps, a screwdriver and six construction gloves, she'd create a way for herself to go anywhere she could ever want to go just by lifting anchor, a way for her to carry her own home around with her everywhere she'd go. It'd been a chance for her to do something constructive with her hands, which she'd always thought of as a good outlet for her to channel her emotional pain into.

The Géricault's beating heart was a power generator, its eyes a searchlight and periscope on stalks, its nerves wires, its veins pipes, its blood coolants, its muscles pumps, its brains a navigation system and it breathed steam through a blowhole. The iron tail it swung and iron fins it waved gave it surprising maneuvrability and although it might have still seemed a bit empty for only one passenger and would probably easily still have had room for three or four more, she'd filled up some of the empty space with a few plants, microscopes, telescopes, clocks, beakers, vats, tubes, anatomy charts, a model biplane, a ship in a bottle and a printed out Medusa's Raft on a wall to keep her company. The Jolly Roger, narwhal horn and jelly-creeper torpedoes hadn't been part of the initial planning stages, she'd just gotten a little bit carried away after really getting into the swing of things, but she'd decided afterwards that she'd liked them enough to keep them anyway.

"Slow and steady now..."

The final quarter, she'd spent on a whole year's worth of frozen Indian cuisine, Indian tea and a few medical supplies for possible emergencies. That had been supposed to be the second part of the plan she'd had in mind when building the Géricault. Mano had lived with her parents for many years and with Elizabeth for several more, but now that she'd been left all on her own, she hadn't felt like she could face her parents after leaving them the way she had. She'd felt so ashamed of herself for having been unable to stop Elizabeth from doing what she'd done that she'd become afraid to look other people in the face when she'd been walking down the street, fearing that someone would have recognized her, that the memories would have come flooding back to her, that she could have been asked questions she hadn't wanted to have to answer. She'd realized that she'd never really learned how to live alone, and she'd decided to give herself a crash course in it. She'd known that sentences between murder, manslaughter and criminal negligence varied, and although she may not have been guilty of criminal negligence in the eyes of the law, her own three eyes saw things differently from that, so she'd figured a year's solitary confinement would have been a start, at least. Elizabeth had always preferred to remain as true to her hermit name as her goals in life had allowed her to, and Mano had thought that maybe a period of extended seclusion would have helped her understand what she'd seen as being of value in that. If she hadn't found an answer to the questions which plagued her before her supplies would have run out, she'd have to come up with plan B then and there.

She'd gone on a pilgrimage to wherever it was that the truth was being kept safely out of the reach of children.